As she strolls down the uneven, May-moist bricks that pave most Cambridge sidewalks, Natalie Portman ’03 has something to make her the envy of many undergraduates: a dog.

Charlie—the petite and well-kept mutt that accompanies the psychology concentrator and film actor on jaunts through the Square and its environs—is an unusual companion at a college where most students are forbidden to keep pets.

But perched alertly on Portman’s lap, Charlie hardly seems lonely. He aims his short snout at a passing spaniel and twitches his nose in the easy spring breeze. Like his owner, he appears confident in the shade of Harvard’s halls.

But both will be leaving Cambridge in less than a month. After seven semesters at the College, Portman is taking her degree beneath crimson banners.

In spite of an impressive career to date, Portman looks toward a largely uncharted future. She says she intends to take on a series of acting projects for the first few years after graduation—beginning with a trip to Sydney this summer to work on the final installment of George Lucas’ Star Wars series—but her post-college years are otherwise as undefined as most of her classmates’.

This prospect pleases her.

“I’m definitely going to be acting for the next few years, and then I think I’m just going to take it as it comes and see what I feel like,” she says. “I don’t have any further thoughts or plans. I have definite dreams about acting work I want to do and definite dreams about further academic work that I’d be interested in.”

One might not expect a movie actor with more than 10 films to her credit to look toward a postgraduate academic future. But Portman has managed to pursue her academic work passionately while sustaining a successful career.

She has devoted enough attention and interest to her classes to develop friendships with some of her teachers at Harvard, she says.

“I’ve been really fortunate to have a few personal relationships with professors,” she says. “I thinks that’s really the most rewarding thing.”

Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn—among those whom Portman identified as a friend and mentor—says Portman consistently approached her work with diligence and precocity. Her critique of a paper that he and some colleagues wrote on neuroimagery as possible lie detection, Kosslyn says, has impelled them to reassess their methods for future studies.

“She did an absolutely superb job criticizing it,” he says. “In fact, her insights were markedly better than those of the expert reviewers who accepted the paper for publication.”

Kosslyn recalls also that he was able to share with Portman a penchant for French film and an acute sense of humor.

“She is unusually warm and has what I would call an energetic sense of humor,” he says. “She’s very quick and is fun to talk to. She’s witty and clever, sometimes almost wickedly clever.”

Imagining a wicked jibe from Portman, a small, soft-spoken student in thong sandals and bright-pink toenail polish, is difficult.